For pure routing alone your right an atom would be plenty but who wants to build a Linux router just for that?

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An Atom would handle an iptables firewall, DNS, DHCP, and OpenVPN just fine as well. The point is that basic network services like these don't use a ton of resources unless you have a ton of users a a crap ton of bandwidth. You should notice this with your VIA and this Atom is considerably faster than that as well.

via board :
12V power switch
power button
reset button
power and HDD LEDs wired into a RGB LED blue for power, red for HDD
LAN 1 connection and transmit leds wired to a RGB led so it is blue for connected and blinks red when transmitting
LAN 2 connection and transmit leds

Netgear Router:
De solder power socket and replace with wire to main power switch
Wire a RGB LED to the 10 and 100 mbit LEDs for the WAN and 4 LAN ports
Wire RGB LED to power light
de solder reset button and relocate to front panel

i am going to use an ide extension cable cut in half and plugged into its self as a front panel connector so i can disconnect the boards from the case if i have to

Yeah... I was looking at this Asus for the same; not dual nic tho (extra bonus if the ones on the Gigabyte are Intel...but probably not). Passively cooled and has six SATA ports so it's fairly popular as a NAS, however. Also got a PCI-e slot so can toss in a nice RAID card.

Yeah... I was looking at this Asus for the same; not dual nic tho (extra bonus if the ones on the Gigabyte are Intel...but probably not). Passively cooled and has six SATA ports so it's fairly popular as a NAS, however. Also got a PCI-e slot so can toss in a nice RAID card.

It costs almost twice as much but it has PCI plus two PCI-E mini slots. So you could run dual lan, have wireless and use a PCI-E SSD for boot.

Also don't torture these machines with a RAID card. 1.1Ghz dual-core isn't a lot of power. In some cases the Atom is even faster.

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i agree the new amd chips need a high clock speed to be useful for much of anything i have used a laptop with a 1Ghz dual core apu and it was too slow.

hp make some interesting boards if you can live with a restricted bios and the need to use a power supply adapter.

search ebay for:

Asus MOCA-AR
socket 479 2 x ddr2 sodimm
pcie 16x
its compatible with socket 479 core duo and core 2 duo and will run with up to 3gb of ram.
not compatible with pci-e 2.0 ati graphics cards.
you will need to custom build a heatsink. i used a zalman north bridge cooler modified my bending the clips to fit.

i agree the new amd chips need a high clock speed to be useful for much of anything i have used a laptop with a 1Ghz dual core apu and it was too slow.

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It would be doing very different tasks than a laptop would though so it most likely would be enough. If it's only going to be a gateway, size and price is what is important. Any modern x86 processor is going to handle being a gateway just fine. It's when you want it to do other things such as acting as a NAS or hosting something off of it where performance becomes a concern, but at that point you're better off having the resources of a full ATX board.

The thing is for 80 dollars, the Celeron sips power and could easily just use an eSATA RAID enclosure and you'll be cooking with gas. The problem with that is the cost of the eSATA raid enclosure so I'm in this perpetual state of trying to figure out what is better for my purposes, weather that is optimizing for cost, size, power consumption, and performance.

Yeah...for the record though you could convert one of the internal to eSATA; port multiplier does work according to some guy's post somewhere. Kind of moot though due to all the other points made primarily re. CPU speed and such. Bottlenecking has definitely been noted by some trying to use it as a NAS.

Though hasn't there just been a refresh of this low power platform by AMD (such as powering that Zotac ZBOX just reviewed here--or is that just a higher end offering of the same chipset as the Asus I linked to)?

Just keep in mind that it's only a bit faster than the Atom 330. An Atom 525 with dual lan would probably be more power considering it's also a dual core, clocked higher, and has hyper-threading. The only thing the Celeron has that the Atom doesn't is a dual-channel memory controller, which really doesn't do the celeron any good.

Just keep in mind that it's only a bit faster than the Atom 330. An Atom 525 with dual lan would probably be more power considering it's also a dual core, clocked higher, and has hyper-threading. The only thing the Celeron has that the Atom doesn't is a dual-channel memory controller, which really doesn't do the celeron any good.

the Celeron based on a Sandy Bridge i7 core and is faster than a dual core atom in every benchmark the dual core atom only comes close in the multithreaded benchmarks when it can use all 4 hyperthreaded cores. in single threaded benchmarks the atom is down by 25%-50% depending on the program and the power consumption is the same 25W load.